2006-11-10

BlueScreen Screen Saver v3.2


http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/BlueScreen.mspx

Introduction

One of the most feared colors in the NT world is blue. The infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) will pop up on an NT system whenever something has gone terribly wrong. Bluescreen is a screen saver that not only authentically mimics a BSOD, but will simulate startup screens seen during a system boot.

On NT 4.0 installations it simulates chkdsk of disk drives with errors!

On Win2K and Windows 9x it presents the Win2K startup splash screen, complete with rotating progress band and progress control updates!

On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 it present the XP/Server 2003 startup splash screen with progress bar!

Bluescreen cycles between different Blue Screens and simulated boots every 15 seconds or so. Virtually all the information shown on Bluescreen's BSOD and system start screen is obtained from your system configuration - its accuracy will fool even advanced NT developers. For example, the NT build number, processor revision, loaded drivers and addresses, disk drive characteristics, and memory size are all taken from the system Bluescreen is running on.

Use Bluescreen to amaze your friends and scare your enemies!

Bluescreen runs on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 9x (it requires DirectX).

Installation and Use

Note: before you can run Bluescreen on Windows 9x, you must copy \winnt\system32\ntoskrnl.exe from a Windows 2000 system to your \Windows directory.Simply copy Sysinternals BLUESCRN.SCR to your \system32 directory if on Windows NT/2K, or \Windows\System directory if on Windows 9x. Right click on the desktop to bring up the Display settings dialog and then select the "Screen Saver" tab. Use the pull down list to find "Sysinternals Bluescreen" and apply it as your new screen saver. Select the "Settings" button to enable fake disk activity, which adds an extra touch of realism!

More Information

You can find out how real Blue Screen's are generated, and what the information on the Blue Screen means in my December 1997 Windows NT Magazine NT Internal's column, "Inside the Blue Screen".



Download Bluescreen (64 KB)

No comments: